The following is a guest post by Mayor John Biggs who wants to put his side of the argument on the youth sport funding row. It follows two previous guest posts (here and here) by Chris Dunne of the Tower Hamlets Youth Sports Foundation whose future is under threat due to funding problems.

This guest post is interesting because whether you agree with the mayor or not, you can see a logical and reasoned approach to decision-making – an insight never seen with his predecessor, Lutfur Rahman.

Doesn’t mean he’s right, though.

For those desperate for more politics, gossip, accusations of sexism and just general bitching, as well as the serious policy issues like this, take heart – I will report back soon.

By Mayor John Biggs

I should start by welcoming Ted back to the world of Tower Hamlets politics: your absence has been noticed and it is good to see you return to the fold. In a healthy democracy people should always feel able to question, quiz and disagree with decisions politicians make, I have no doubt you will do all three and keep us on our toes.

I know you ran a post from Tower Hamlets Youth and Sports Foundation (THYSF) and I wanted to set out my case for the decision the Council has made as a right of reply.

The 2012 Games promised a lot and whilst the Olympics have delivered some incredible economic regeneration results it’s fair to say the sports legacy from the Games has fallen below expectations.

This is in no small part due to decisions by the Coalition Government to slash funding to school sports and abolish the ring-fenced funding given to School Sport Partnerships like the Tower Hamlets Youth Sports Foundation.

Contrary to some assertions Tower Hamlets Council is not cutting the THYSF. It is not a council-funded service but we have provided them with emergency funding when they faced budget challenges. In fact over the past year we have provided around £150,000 to help cover their deficit..

The problem facing THYSF is that they have always been primarily funded by the schools they provide services to; aside from the small amount of funding the council gets from Sport England which we gave to THYSF to support their programmes.

As Chris Dunne rightly stated in his first article Michael Gove’s scrapping of funding for Sports Partnerships made this model far harder to work. The decision over following years to squeeze school budgets tighter and tighter made things more problematic for THYSF as school funding has reduced.

As a result the THYSF ended the 2016/17 year with a deficit of around £150k.

Valuing the service THYSF provides, the council agreed to underwrite those costs but asked that THYSF produce a business plan that addressed the financial concerns and demonstrated that THYSF can cover all its expenditure from the income it receives, whether by way of the agreements, called SLAs, with the schools to provide services, or from community activities from which additional income can be raised.

In addition to the financial support provided by the council, we offered officer support to better understand the challenges facing THYSF.

This work forecast a further deficit of up to £190k later this year and highlighted the overall challenge facing THYSF, that its costs are fixed, staffing etc, but its income fluctuates significantly.

Furthermore, the analysis found that school subscriptions have been falling for the past three years which has resulted in reducing income at the same time as there has been an increase in the charity’s cost base.

Chris Dunne, of the Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation

In 2012 I understand there were 87 schools buying into THYSF services. In 2017 there are only around 37 with Service agreements with THYSF. That has hit THYSF’s income despite costs staying broadly stable. I appreciate that THYSF dispute these figures and may have others paying for some of their services via other means, but clearly they are facing an existential crisis because of reduced income.

I cannot speak for why schools chose to withdraw from THYSF however it is clear Government cuts have made school budgets far tighter over that time.

Whilst THYSF are not a council service, we have supported them by covering their deficit last year.

The Council has not withdrawn any of its existing funding sources, nor were we proposing to. In fact we have given THYSF more money than ever over the past year to give them time to come up with a new business plan.

Currently the organisation’s staff are formally employed by Langdon Park School. Given the increasing concerns about THYSF’s finances the school no longer wish to host them as they could end up liable for any deficit.

Sadly, we are left with limited options.

Why doesn’t the Council just fund THYSF?

The answer put forward by some that the council just take over THYSF and make them a council department is fraught with risk for taxpayers – it would mean assimilating a service with staffing costs in the region of £600,000-650,000 a year. It would mean adopting a service for which funding does not exist in our budgets and it would not be fair on existing employees who are facing tough choices and restructures.

Central Government cuts mean we have to save 1 in every 6 pounds we currently spend – that’s £58m over this and the coming years with yet more cuts looming on the horizon.

It may be easy for other political groups to play politics about this issue; however my administration has had to clear up the mismanagement of the past at the same time as facing devastating cuts from Central Government.

There is also an urban myth circulating that the council spends £3.8m on sports already and all we need to do is reallocate some of that. This just simply is not true. The actual budget for our sports team is around £1.1m which achieves excellent value for money providing services such as:

Community programmes in the borough’s parks including a free health & fitness programme targeting approximately 2,000 inactive people, the majority of which have been women and girls.

Our Summer Sports Programme in Parks, leisure centres and the community which last year saw over 13,000 people take part in a diverse range of sports and activities for young people ranging from athletics and BMX/cycling to canoeing and kayaking.

Programmes like the Young@Heart for the Over 50’s, The Women and Girls Swim Programme, Sport4Women and Disability sport programme, free swimming on Fridays and Saturdays and under 16 swimming for just £1. These all make sporting activities accessible and affordable for residents of all ages.

On top of that our Sports team has generated over £4 million in external funding from organisations such as London Marathon Trust, Sport England, The Premier League and FA Facilities Fund. Without this work, the improvements to the borough’s sporting infrastructure, particularly those in our parks, would cease. The Stepney Green Astro-turf, the refurbishment of the borough’s tennis courts, the replacement of the astro-turf at John Orwell Sports Centre and Mile End Stadium, the resurfacing of the athletics track at Mile End Stadium. All were made possible by the council’s investment in sports.

Much of this work would be at risk if we cut funding from the current service in order to reallocate it to THYSF. These are improvements which benefit the whole community including our young people.

What we are planning to do

THYSF’s future is in their own hands. The council has supported them for a year to give them extra time but we cannot do so forever as we just do not have the funds, much like the schools who are choosing to no longer buy their services.

Like any organisation THYSF must produce a plan which balances its income with its costs. They have to do so now as Langdon Park School have decided to end the relationship with THYSF. The Foundation either have to choose to employ its staff directly or to close.

It is clear that Government cuts have made it far harder for schools to afford the THYSF service; particularly if similar organisations offer it for less money. That is a decision for schools. It is a challenge that is facing schools across the country.

I have said all along that we would support THYSF to step out on their own should they wish to set up as a new social enterprise. They would still need a solid business plan and the council would probably commission them to run some of the services they offer. That is why the council is funding a consultant to work with THYSF to help them work up this kind of proposal. What we cannot do is take their organisation into the council without the finances to pay for it.

Should THYSF close, the council will use the funding we receive from Sport England, which we currently give to THYSF, to help us step-in and support the running of the inter-borough and School Games. Similarly, we will continue to support the borough’s participation in the London Youth Games, as we are committed to ensuring young people do not lose out on these opportunities.

We would also ensure schools are offered a core package of sports by other high-quality providers including specialist cricket, hockey, cycling, football and other sports in conjunction with national sport governing bodies and organisations like Middlesex Cricket, England Hockey and professional football clubs who run these programmes in many other areas. It is however important that we act quickly, to ensure our young people have continuing support in the new school year.

I have considered the information that THYSF have sent through and wrote to Chris on 3rd August setting out the support we have offered at each stage of the process. Whilst I sympathise with THYSF’s position, it simply isn’t the case that without them there would be no sport provision for young people. We have worked with them to support and underwrite their costs over the past year.

I also understand why in times of financial challenges Langdon Park School view their current position of directly employing all the THYSF staff as unsustainable. I would be more than happy to see THYSF spin themselves off as a charitable enterprise, and I have been clear the council would support that. What I cannot do is cut other vital services the council provides in order to save a model which has hit financial challenges and will continue to do so, as a result of schools choosing to pull out from funding the organisation.

Chris is entirely right that, with a few sad exceptions, politicians don’t go into public life to ‘do bad things for their electors.’ This is a tricky situation and not one which is anywhere near as simple as some have tried to make out but like Chris I believe in the power of sports to transform lives. That is why whatever happens to THYSF we will continue to ensure that young people in our borough have the opportunities to participate in high quality sports and inter-borough and London-wide games.

The following is another guest post by Chris Dunne, the former head of Langdon Park School and now fighting to save the acclaimed Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation. His first post on this blog can be read here. In this article he attacks Labour councillors for their failure to attend a public meeting on the issue. One, Cllr Abdul Mukit (MBE, lest we forget) – the cabinet member for sport – was apparently sitting in a cafe around the corner while it was going on. Given his record of claiming questionable expenses at Spitalfields Housing Association, I’m not surprised.

[As an aside, and in other news, Rachael Saunders, the deputy mayor, has quit. She, like Josh Peck, Amy Whitelock-Gibbs and Shiria Khatun, has also decided her time is now up in Tower Hamlets politics. None of them are standing for re-election next May. And these were the sensible ones. Mess? Certainly. More on that in a separate post.]

By Chris Dunne (pictured)

When Mayor John Biggs was asked in the council meeting on July 19 if he had a seconder for his motion – to dismantle the Tower Hamlets Youth Sport programme – I thought he was just being facetious when he claimed, “I think I’ve got 20 seconders”. Given the deafening silence coming from the ranks of Labour councillors, both then and since, it seems he wasn’t kidding.

As a former headteacher I have always tried to behave well in public, but the shameful way the matter was subsequently treated in the Chamber I believe fully justified my telling the Mayor and his ‘seconders’ on the Labour benches that they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

It wasn’t the mayor’s fault that council rules barred councillors from asking me questions, but he certainly took full advantage of it. With no possibility of our countering his statements, Trustees and staff of the Foundation were forced to sit and listen to the mayor grossly distort the truth about the Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation and in many cases to say things that were totally untrue.

Which is why we organised a public meeting and debate on the evening of Sunday July 30. Everyone, especially the mayor, was invited. The Opposition parties were well represented. Cllr Rabina Khan and Cllr Ohid Ahmed both attended and spoke very supportively of the programme, as did Elaine Bagshaw, representing the Liberal Democrats. The meeting was very well attended, including by many youngsters, and dealt exhaustively with all the issues. It had been scheduled to finish after an hour and a half at 7.30pm, but instead ran over two hours, when we had to call a halt only because the Foundation’s manager Chris Willetts and our Cricket Officer, Jahid Ahmed, had to leave to take a busload of youngsters to the West Midlands for a cricket residential.

You can imagine how disappointed everyone was that not one single Labour councillor thought it was important enough to attend the meeting. The mayor had had to pull out during the day because of family commitments, but not one of his ‘seconders’ was apparently ready or willing to take his place and defend the Labour decision to dismantle the borough’s youth sport programme. Not even Cllr Abdul Mukit, in whose own ward the meeting was taking place and who is the Cabinet Lead Councillor for sport!

I have to say I share the outrage felt by some Labour Party members who told me they encountered Cllr Mukit in a café round the corner from the meeting when they were on their way home. For not one Labour councillor to turn up was, I believe, simply disrespectful to the thousands and thousands of young people who are going to have their life opportunities severely curtailed by the mayor’s disgraceful decision, a decision publicly supported by all Labour councillors in the Chamber on July 19.

It is simply not good enough either for them to hide behind the excuse that the meeting would have been used to play party politics.

Abul Hasnath, who presents a community affairs programme on a British-Bangladeshi TV channel, independently chaired the meeting. He and I both asked everyone to focus their contributions on the provision of life opportunities for young people (many of whom were present to help them do just that) rather than on personalities or parties.

I made a point of saying that THYSF has operated under two administrations, two mayors, three chief executives, and very many directors/officers. I said clearly that I did not believe politicians of any party, nationally or locally, stood for election in order to do bad things for their electors.

I also specifically said that I did not believe John Biggs would deliberately say things that were untrue. As a hard-working mayor he relies on many people to give him accurate information about issues like this. I said that somewhere along the way he must have been given the inaccurate impressions referred to in our evidence folder or told things that were not true and, understandably, may have believed them to be true.

We have given the mayor and every councillor a fat folder of hard copies of the evidence to demonstrate the distortions and untruths I spoke of earlier.

In essence we are saying to the mayor and his councillors that:

He was totally wrong to claim there has been a serious decline in the number of schools subscribing to our service. We are working with almost 60 schools in the borough, not the 34 the mayor claimed.

The Mayor’s claim that we have been running deficits (plural) is flatly contradicted by the 4 years (out of 5) that we in fact ran small surpluses, which we have itemised year by year.

The Mayor’s claim that the Trustees of the Foundation had refused to produce a Business Plan is untrue. We submitted a lengthy and detailed Business Plan, but this was rejected by the council.

The Mayor claimed in the Chamber to have an ‘alternative plan’, and all the Labour councillors supported it. No one has yet seen this plan, or at least if they have they haven’t shared it with us. It certainly won’t be based on a borough sports strategy, because the only one of those that exists we wrote ourselves.

There Is Still A Way To Solve This Problem – If There Is The Political Will

It is important to note at this point that the clock is ticking pretty fast. The redundancy process is already under way – conducted unsurprisingly by Council officials at the Town Hall, despite the mayor’s repeated attempts to hide behind the excuse that “it’s the school that’s making them redundant”.

There is however, despite the lateness of the hour, an honourable way forward if the mayor and his councillors want to grasp it.

The mayor has repeatedly claimed he had appointed a consultant to help us write a Business Plan. That of course was not true. What is true is that both I and another Trustee had separately written to him to ask him to do exactly that. Neither of us received any reply to this request.

The consultant the mayor is referring to has however now had the opportunity over the last two months to learn exactly how our operation runs and how it is financed and would as a result be in a very good position to give such sound advice to the mayor.

In a face-to-face meeting since the Council meeting, I asked the Mayor to honour that original claim of his ‘retrospectively’, by asking the consultant to advise him directly on what he regards are the feasible options, if any, for saving the core of our youth sport programme. I am pleased to say that he firmly agreed to do just that. We now await confirmation that this has happened and to consider the outcome.

What is already clear of course is the advice of another consultant, commissioned by the council, has given on the question of youth sport provision in Tower Hamlets. Asked to compare expenditure on youth sport with other similar boroughs, his report said (my emphasis)

Local authority finance outturns for sports-related functions suggest that LBTH maintains expenditure comparable to other boroughs. Given that as of 2012 responsibilities for delivery of youth-focused sport programmes has been distributed across LBTH and the newly formed THYSF, benchmarking data suggests therefore that LBTH has relatively higher spend for the more limited sports functions it delivers (primary focus of adult sport and physical activity) when compared to other boroughs.

This context suggests that where there is any amendment to functions and budgets for delivery of youth and adult community sport functions across LBTH and THYSF, consideration should be made of the apparent relative high spend on a more limited sport remit compared to other boroughs – and therefore future delivery should consider appropriate allocation of funding to community work as currently delivered by THYSF. Future delivery may therefore be through either taking back functions or commissioning services as appropriate.

Or to put it even more simply, “you spend most of the money you do spend on sport on adults, because you have devolved responsibility for youth sport to THYSF, and if that organisation doesn’t exist you will need to either start doing it and paying for it yourselves or you will have to pay someone else to do it for you”.

My question to the mayor is a simple one – about value for money, or ‘bang for your buck’ as the Americans would have it. It’s this:

“Since this issue will cost the Council whatever happens, why not spend the money positively, attempting to save a hugely popular and highly successful organisation, rather than waste it negatively on staff redundancies, giving money back to schools that they have already paid for this financial year, and then trying to provide, and pay for, a third-rate patching up exercise after you’ve watched it die?”

That wouldn’t be getting value for money for borough residents. It’d be hugely wasting it. And people like me would be reminding everyone of that – at every opportunity and right up to the next elections.

I’ve not been very successful at updating this blog on a regular basis over the past couple of years. Partly this is due to time, and partly it’s due to the energy to keep it flowing.

During the Lutfur years, the overriding whiff that there was something rotten in the Kingdom of Rahman meant it was much easier to invest that time and effort.

Since then, that same stench of maladministration has dissipated. The Government Commissioners gave their seal of approval and have been gone for many months.

But that’s not to say they were right to do so and that there isn’t anything to see.

This from the Momentum Tower Hamlets Facebook page seems to back up suggestions they’re not exactly representative of the borough’s population

The politics are as nasty, complicated and divisive as ever — exacerbated in part by the growing strength of Momentum and the SWP newspaper sellers over the Tower Hamlets Labour party (not to mention the fall out from Shiria Khatun’s sacking as deputy mayor by John Biggs). More on that in another post, soon.

But rather it’s the Grenfell factor that acts as a spur to blog again. The ‘dull but worthy’ stuff needs doing. Except that the guest post below is by no means dull.

In a borough so historically split – or perceived to be split – on race grounds, there are few better unifiers among us all, but particularly schoolchildren, than sport. Invest in sport and you get so much more than the odd medal or rosette.

Over the past decade, one of the great success stories in inner city Tower Hamlets has been the huge improvement in the borough’s schools – and that’s so much more than exam results. The borough’s attitude to sports, especially as there are relatively few playing spaces, has been great.

In many ways, this has been down to the leadership of a few individuals. Former councillor Abdal Ullah deserves credit for his promotion of football, that’s for sure, but it was the ex-headteacher of Langdon Park School in Poplar, Chris Dunne, who has been the real visionary (he was Ed Miliband’s English teacher and he once taught me a lesson after he rightly challenged me over one of my pieces years ago).

His championing of the borough’s school sports partnership made it one of the best in Britain. But as he spells out below, all this is now at very real risk of being undone.

He blames John Biggs and Labour. Well, more than blame…his anger boiled over to such an extent on Wednesday night, that he was escorted out of the chamber by council officers. (I’m now in good company…).

The mayor and Labour, meanwhile, will no doubt say this is all about austerity and government cuts. Let’s hope they’re not playing politics.

OK, take a breather, sit back and enjoy this really excellent piece by Chris Dunne (pictured below).

By Chris Dunne

Mayor John Biggs and Labour councillors on Wednesday night did to the children of Tower Hamlets what Michael Gove did to the children of the country. Just days before the fifth anniversary of the London Olympics they voted to make the staff of the most successful youth sports partnership in the country redundant and wind up its operations.

Why am I so angry with this? Well, first let me admit it is personal (I Chair the Foundation that supports its work), but also because I passionately believe that when we make promises we should mean what we say. As a country we won the right to stage the Olympics because we said we would use them to establish a lasting legacy for all young people. One year before the London Games the Coalition Government trashed that idea in public when Gove, representing the Coalition Government, dismantled the school sports partnerships that were already making such a huge and effective impact across our country.

On Wednesday night the Mayor of a Borough that is still proudly claiming to be ‘Olympic’ trashed the only partnership left in the country still providing all the opportunities we had promised to the world – and providing them not for well-off children but for some of the poorest and most deserving children in the nation.

What do I know about it? Pretty much everything, having been involved from the start 12 years ago.

I was Headteacher of Langdon Park secondary school from 1992 to 2013. In 2005 we became the first Sports Specialist College in the borough. As such we were designated by the Government to run one of the 500 School Sports Partnerships in the country. It was one of the very few times in my life when I can remember a Government both setting schools some hugely ambitious targets and providing them with the resources to reach them. In essence the SSPs were designed to do the following:

• Increase (to a specific percentage each year) the time spent weekly by children on sport and physical activity • Increase substantially the number of different sports on offer to all children • Each secondary school to release a trained PE teacher for half the week to work in a cluster of local primary schools helping to train primary colleagues to deliver quality PE lessons • Create clear pathways for children to pursue their involvement in sport beyond the school gates and after they leave school, through links to local clubs

I was responsible for making this happen in 45 schools in Tower Hamlets, and the Government sent me the money to do it.

Chris Willetts

I advertised for someone to manage this project and was fortunate to secure the services of a young man called Chris Willetts who, since 2005, has with a highly committed team quite simply transformed the sporting landscape for the youth of our Borough.

A second SSP was established at the Council to do the same thing with the other half of the Borough. It rapidly became obvious to us that it made sense to combine the two SSPs and to let Chris manage both. He and all the staff we subsequently appointed were employed by my school, but on behalf of the Borough in whose schools they all worked.

Between 2005 and 2010 Chris worked tirelessly (at one point I later discovered he was sleeping in his car while he sorted out somewhere to live) to make this one of the most successful SSPs in the country. In 2005 the percentage of children in the Borough getting two hours or more PE / Sport a week was 25%. By the time Gove did his work five years later that figure had increased to 90%, and we had exceeded Government targets every single year.

The number of sports on offer was rapidly increased to 25, where it still stands – though not for much longer. Sports specialists were appointed in a range of sports, both to work in schools skilling up pupils and enthusing them to enjoy their sport, but also to establish after-school borough-wide clubs, identify talented children and link them up with clubs to develop their prowess. The year before Chris started work there were 2 inter-school sports competitions in the borough. Chris and his team set themselves highly ambitious targets and in very little time that number of competitions had increased to 70+ a year, where it stands to this day – though not for much longer.

Currently 12 of our sports have borough squads or academies. Two examples:

• In 2005 there were no judo clubs in Tower Hamlets. Our newly appointed coach Marius, rapidly established three clubs in the borough, still attended by hundreds of youngsters, many of whom compete at a high level. Along the way he spotted a very young boy called Leo in one of the primary schools who he believed had exceptional talent. Leo, now 18, fights up and down the country and abroad and has been identified for Junior Team GB, and Marius is still at his side.

• In Tower Hamlets many youngsters are very keen on cricket, especially among the borough’s large Bangladeshi community. Tower Hamlets has no cricket club. Chris Willetts is a serious cricket player himself and soon after arriving here joined Blackheath Cricket Club in Greenwich. The first youngsters from Tower Hamlets went to Blackheath in Chris’s car, more joined them in other staff cars, and more still could follow when we bought a minibus and appointed Jahid, an ex-Essex County player to lead the sport’s development. Dozens of our youngsters now play at Blackheath as members, some of them have progressed to county level, and one became the first young Bangladeshi to win a contract with the MCC. A couple of days ago we played the fifth of our annual matches against the MCC, where our youngsters, mostly Asian, get to play against (and have lunch and tea with) some very talented adult, and incidentally mostly white, cricketers.

Hope you’ve spotted the most important factor here. Our coaches are not just coaches in their sport – for many of our youngsters they become mentors, surrogate big brothers / sisters, personally involving themselves in overcoming many of the obstacles that our youngsters in particular often face. When one of our young cricketers was told by his family that he could not stay overnight on a tour of the West Country Chris Willetts drove him back to his house in Bow then picked him up the next morning to drive him back to Somerset.

When Gove destroyed the national SSP scheme, in Tower Hamlets we decided that this was too important to lose. Headteachers agreed to pay subscriptions to a new organization (we set up a Foundation that became a company and then a charity), Langdon Park agreed to continue to employ the staff, and the Council agreed to underwrite potential future redundancies, to passport the money they spent on the London Youth Games to the new Foundation and to commission services from it wherever feasible.

For four years of the past five the Foundation operated in surplus, but it was becoming apparent that things needed to change if we were to secure the future. Firstly, Langdon Park (I retired as Head in 2013) quite understandably did not want to employ the staff ‘ad infinitum’. Secondly, schools’ budgets were coming under increasing pressure. Thirdly, the Council had not only commissioned no services from us; they had not even paid us any money for schools to enter the annual London Youth Games. Indeed, a report commissioned by the Council itself showed that by comparison with similar boroughs they spent far less on young people, not least because of our Foundation’s existence. In reality everything that was happening in youth sport in the borough was being managed by us and paid for largely by the schools, together with some corporate sponsorship raised by the Foundation.

Trustees of the Foundation (by then I was the Chair) alerted the newly elected Mayor John Biggs to this in Autumn 2015 and sought his urgent intervention to construct a plan with us to secure this work for future generations of children. Apart from one conversation about taking the staff into the Council’s sports department almost nothing happened for a full year, which I wrote to the Mayor to point out. By the time any real discussions were being had a number of unforeseen factors had led to a small deficit being accumulated for the financial year 2016/17. We made it clear however that not only was this a blip (after four years of operating with a surplus) but one that could be easily remedied if the Council had the political will, and in particular was prepared to share the funding of this work with their schools.

Chris Dunne with his former pupil, Ed Miliband

This blog is not the place for a detailed account of the discussions between us. In essence, in our proposed business plan we asked the Council to transfer the staff from Langdon Park into the Council for an interim period while we examined the feasibility of setting up an independent trust (transferring staff to the Council was their own first suggestion, and would cost them nothing since they already underwrite redundancy costs). The Council declined, insisting instead on the transfer of all the staff (with their existing borough terms and conditions of employment) directly and pretty much immediately to the Trustees of the Charity.

Furthermore, they insisted that we produce a second business plan both to reflect this and to remove everything from our programme that was not school-based. Or to put it more clearly, to remove everything that I have already described in this article, and much more like it.

No more squads and academies. No more competitions. No more talent identification and nurturing. No more mentoring. No more children playing sport at the highest levels possible. No more county. No more national. No more Junior Team GB.

The Council surely can’t have been surprised when the Trustees told the Mayor that they found this an impossible prospect. To take on the costs of employing borough staff on borough terms and conditions would in itself have been very challenging, but to do so knowing that the programme they would be offering would be hugely less attractive both to the schools that would provide the bulk of their income and to the corporate sponsors who provided the rest, made it totally unviable. To this day the one option that was / is totally viable remains on the table, unopened. It’s really very simple:

• The Council transfers these ‘borough’ workers from Langdon Park to its own direct control – funded by school subscriptions or made redundant (at no extra cost) if the schools do not buy the service

• The Council redresses the imbalance in spending of its existing budget for sport – an imbalance pointed out in a report it itself commissioned – to focus more resources on the very high youth population in the borough, thus reducing the costs to schools, who currently face enormous pressures on their budgets

In Tower Hamlets for the last five years schools and the Foundation have been doing everything in their power to keep the best sports partnership in the country alive in this seriously deprived ‘Olympic’ borough. In addition to everything I have already described, since we started our work over 200 teachers every year are trained by our staff to deliver high quality PE to their pupils An award-winning scheme has seen 2,500 teenagers, boys and girls of every race and religion, trained to lead and coach sport for younger children across the borough. Three youngsters have made it into Junior Team GB. Since we took over the running of our entry to the London Youth Games we have improved our position from 25th (out of 33 boroughs) to 9th. This year Tower Hamlets won “most improved borough” status at the London Youth Games.

Despite all of the above the Council made the decision to close the programme down and make the staff redundant. In typical cavalier fashion it was announced in an internal bulletin for Headteachers before any of the staff concerned had been officially informed. In fact, at the time of writing this article some of the staff concerned have still to be notified officially!

In just 10 days more than 6,000 children, parents, teachers, club officials and residents had signed a petition, and many dozens of them from every part of the borough had attended a rally at the Town Hall before the Council Meeting at which the petition would be debated. Hundreds of residents, young and old, have left messages of support on the on-line petition, pleading with the Council not to allow this service to go under. Their comments, some of which are reproduced below, make heart-warming reading.

A Bengali Muslim PE teacher is rare and I’ve only managed that because of THYSF. I get to be a role model for so many young girls out there and make a positive impact to our community.

The Youth Sport Foundation was founded in Tower Hamlets to get young kids into the world of sports. It has positively impacted many kids within the borough to pursue their interest in sports and reach their goals through the help of many talented and highly experienced coaches. The Youth Sport Foundation has now become the target of the brutal and extensive budget cuts within the borough of Tower Hamlets and I am pleading with the many out there who feel as passionately as I do about the programme. Please take a few minutes to sign the petition I have provided so that we can keep this great cause alive. The Youth Sport Foundation has also helped me to pave my career as a teacher and I would not be where I am today without the support and guidance of the programme.

This organisation has been doing an incredible job in a very troubled and impoverished borough. It has set me on to bigger and better things in life, I am currently in the NHS as a therapist but without Tower Hamlets Youth Sports, I wouldn’t be here.

This program is amazing, It played major part in mine and many others individuals developments and integration to UK.

I’m signing this because the company helps a lot of people get off the streets, also it has personally helped me massively THYSF is a fantastic organisation and I would never have been able to play at the high level of hockey which I do without being introduced into the sport by them.

The Chair of the Youth Sport Trust, and the woman who oversaw the funding of Team GB, Baroness Campbell, had written to the Mayor to express her worry and disappointment at the decision.

All the Council were being asked to do differently, since the staff of the Foundation are already borough employees, was to help schools with the cost of running these programmes, by redirecting some of the £3.8m in their sports budget to this hugely successful enterprise. The Council’s own report has already shown that they spend far less on children’s sport because of the Foundation’s existence.

Seb (Lord) Coe wrote recently about the enormous damage done to youth sport in England in 2011 by “meddling and ill-informed government ministers” when they dismantled the highly successful school sports partnerships that were already making such a difference to young people’s lives. At Wednesday night’s council meeting Labour councillors, either because they don’t care or because they had been given false or inaccurate information by their Mayor, voted down a motion to protect the Tower Hamlets Youth Sport Foundation and secure a sporting future for our children, and voted instead for an unpublished “plan” proposed by the Mayor that he must know is simply undeliverable.

The Mayor, protected by Standing Orders that clearly very few councillors understood, and that both denied them the right to ask me questions and me to have any right of reply, made a string of assertions that were either gross distortions of the facts or simply untrue.

The Mayor has apparently told his supporters that his plan will “support youth sport, including the provision of inter-borough, School Games and London Youth Games and support local clubs and elite sport”. Since he hasn’t bothered to seek the advice of the staff who have been delivering this service, including Chris Willetts, the man who has led this transformation for over 12 years, I have to assume that this “plan”, if it even exists, is just another example of the politician’s art, of saying a lot while intending to deliver little or nothing.

Those of us who have been involved with this Borough for many years know precisely what the sporting future now holds for our children and their families, as we rapidly return to the days when fewer and fewer sports are on offer, most of them without a borough squad or academy, when only a few children have the resources and connections to find their way to specialist clubs, almost all of them outside this borough, or to compete at the highest levels, leaving all that to children from more comfortably off families in more affluent parts of the country. All the while being forced to listen to ignorant and sickening drivel from privately educated politicians, bemoaning the fact that so many members of Team GB have come from independent or private schools.

Before security officers showed me to the door of the Council Chamber, and despite the best attempts of the Speaker to drown me out by banging her gavel, I managed to tell the Mayor and his supporters on the Labour benches (I’m a Labour Party member incidentally) that thousands of children and their families would never forgive them and that they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. So they should, and I intend to go on calling out this Mayor in public, to expose the lies and deceptions and downright incompetence that underlies this decision.

Let’s hope the Mayor will have the guts to face me in public rather than hiding behind the totally undemocratic ‘regulations’ that allowed him to rubbish our work and distort the facts, and not give me any right of reply. I’m not holding my breath.